EXCLUSIVE: An Interview With Twitter's Forgotten Founder, Noah Glass

Before that he was the co-founder of a startup called Odeo. He had an investor who would become co-founder and CEO, Ev Williams.

Odeo was supposed to be a podcasting platform. But then Apple launched iTunes and everyone at Odeo panicked.

Williams told everyone: come up with something for us to do next!

Along with Jack Dorsey and a developer named Florian Webber, Glass pitched something called Twitter. Glass came up with the name. Williams liked it enough to put Glass in charge. The product became Glass' obsession. He told Williams he wanted to spin it out of Odeo as its own company.

But by the summer of 2006, Williams was tired of Odeo. He bought it – and its assets, including Twitter – back from Odeo investors. He renamed the company Obvious. Then he fired Noah Glass.

Writing that story, we managed to finally get a hold of Glass, who had not updated his Twitter, YouTube, or blog accounts in almost two years. Friends thought he had moved to Alaska and dropped out of life.

The conversation we had with Glass touched on what it feels like to be left out of history, how hard it is to be "betrayed" by your friends, and whether Ev Williams lied to Odeo investors about Twitter's numbers. It went like this …

BUSINESS INSIDER: Tell me if I'm wrong. It seems like you are the Twitter co-founder that no one talks about. Is that it?

NOAH GLASS: Well, yeah. That's true.

I was not in the story, which in some ways was difficult to deal with in the beginning, since it was a massive labor of love and a massive labor to get it created. To create the thing, to bring it into the world. It was a ton of effort and a ton of energy.

To not be included in the story was hard to swallow at first, but when I realized what was happening to the product, this thing I helped create, the thing's not about me. The thing's about itself. Twitter is a phenomenon and a massively beneficial tool and it's incredibly useful and it helps a lot of people. I realized the story's not about me. That's okay.

BI: Tell me a little bit about the beginning of 2006 and how this thing got going.

NG: [Odeo] was in turmoil, honestly. Investors were not really happy with what was going on. Ev, who was CEO, was not really happy with the company with growth and the direction it was going. We were sort of looking for something else. We were looking for a backup plan. We had a certain amount of money and we had a team in place. We just started experimenting with stuff.

I was looking at stuff like how people were communicating on MySpace and other social networking things and seeing how people were trying to communicate and seeing how systems weren't really designed to do what people were doing with them. But people were trying to communicate in a certain kind of way. Non-synchronous. Non-realtime communication. Almost like building on the blogging idea.

Jack [Dorsey] was someone who was one of the stars of the company and I got the impression he was unhappy with what he was working on. He was doing a lot of cleanup work on Odeo. He and I had become pretty close friends and were spending time together.

He started talking to me about this idea of status and how he was really interested in status. He developed this bicycle messenger status system in the past. I was trying to figure out what it was he found compelling about it. At the same time, we were looking at 'groups' models and how groups were formed and put a couple things together to look at this idea of status and to look at this idea of grouping and it sort of hit me — the idea for this product. This thing that would be called Twitter, what it would look like. This ad hoc grouping mechanism with non-realtime status updates all based on mobile phones.

There was a moment when I was sitting with Jack and I said, "Oh, I do see how this could really come together to make something really compelling." We were sitting on Mission St. in the car in the rain. We were going out and I was dropping him off and having this conversation. There was a moment where it all fit together for me.

We went back to Odeo and put together a team. A very separate working team, mostly it was myself, Jack, and Florian [Webber], a contractor. [Florian] was working from Germany at the time. Have you talked to Florian at all?

BI: I've tried to reach him but he's difficult to reach.

NG: I haven't spoken with him in 5 years. He has his own ideas about how life works. He's an amazing guy and a major part of it also.

That's a thing I want to reiterate — you're trying to look for the full story. Some people have gotten credit, some people haven't. The reality is it was a group effort. There were lots of people putting ideas into and it couldn't have been done without this group of people. Whether or not there's individuals who get credit or don't get credit, that may be totally irrelevant. It was a collaboration. And it was almost a collaboration that came out of necessity.

In a lot of ways, we needed something. We felt a definite pressure. I felt like in two months I'd have nothing to take on. I had no idea what I was going to be doing. I was looking for something else and I wanted to keep the team together.

I put together a bare-bones team and kept it really separate and I ran it by Ev and the investors. I did all I could to keep it separate because there was lots of stuff going on with Odeo. Trying to make it better, trying to sell it. And lots of distractions. It was really difficult. Here I was inside of a sinking ship trying to launch a rocketship out of it. It was a very tumultuous, scary, and nervous time.

BI: I heard from one of Odeo's investors that you approached people at one point to say, "Hey, let me spin this thing off and start a company called Twitter." Is that true?

NG: Yeah. That's totally true. And that's probably part of the reason why I'm no longer involved with it. I felt like Odeo was crashing around me and I didn't want Twitter to be.

We had done a soft launch of it. I kept it really secret. I didn't want anyone to know what we were working on as we were setting up all the technical aspects of it.

Originally, it was all running on my laptop on my desk. An IBM Thinkpad. Using a Verizon wireless card. It was right there on my desk. I could just pick it up and take it anywhere in the world. That was a really fun time.

BI: That's when you wanted to spin Twitter off from Odeo?

NG: That was the plan — take this thing and spin it off. At that time, even in the very early stages, I had this strange feeling that I had never had before — that this was something big. I felt it from the onset. People must have thought I was a crazy person because of the way I treated it. That may have been detrimental. I really felt strongly, more strongly than I felt about anything in the past and since then — that this is something massive sitting right here in front of us. All it needs is time to grow.

I actually had done all the paperwork and was ready to roll. It was ready to go. That's not the way it worked out.

BI: I asked an investor "why did Evan end up running the company and not you?" The person basically said Ev had the money.

NG: Yeah, he had the power. Looking back, it seems to be the right thing now. It worked out, right? At the time, it didn't feel like it.

Maybe I would have done things slightly differently and that was one of the things Ev and I had a disagreement on early on, and I told him I would do things differently.

This may be cliché to say, but when you speak truth to power, the ramifications can go a lot of different ways. Evan Williams is a powerhouse. Did you talk to him at all?

BI: I've tried to. He doesn't really want to talk.

NG:: He can talk to who he wants to now. He's the creator of Blogger, he's a massively influential person behind the blogging thing. He definitely has some amazing skills. What he did with Twitter definitely resulted in growth that was phenomenal.

I spent a lot of time early-on building a mechanism that would facilitate growth that we saw and facilitate sharing like what we see happening now. Initially, the product was growing because of the social aspect between people. The idea that police departments or fire departments are using it to give updates on the city, that was something we built into it in the very beginning as a concept. A lot of that stuff was hashed out early on.

BI: You said you felt almost immediately that Twitter could go somewhere and be powerful. When do you think Evan sort of saw that?

NG: I don't know if he sees it now, honestly. He's no longer the CEO. That's probably indicative. I think the way he works, and the way everyone works, is to validate it within your community. He saw his friends grabbing on to it early on and thought, "Oh, this is something." Whether he thought it was something big, I never really got that indication.

BI: Do you think he saw something valuable in Twitter before he bought it back from investors?

NG: Yes. Of course he did. Ev is very shrewd. He's a very shrewd businessman, and he's had a lot of practice. He's had lots of failures in the past. He's had some big failures in the past. That's his business — to isolate and spot value where it is.

There's a difference between between fanatical — and I hate to say that I was fanatical — but to be extremely passionate like I am or being very super rational and calculated like he is. Evan and I are two different polar opposites. I am very passionate about certain things and I will get passionate about certain things I believe in. I'll speak passionately and I'll wave my arms and I'll jump up and down and I'll use energy to prove my point or create momentum around an idea. Whereas he'll sit down, think about it, write it down, walk away. He'll write a paper on it, come back and say, "This is my opinion." He's very calculated.